A difficulty in addressing a manufacturing scheduling problem can be related to the problem size. Typical manufacturing scheduling problems involve stations, tasks to be performed on the stations, and a significantly large number of lots to be processed by the stations. For example, scheduling can depend on a number of tools, a number of lots, a sequential order of operations, constraints, etc. With large scheduling problems, it is generally not possible, nor desirable, to schedule all of the large number of lots. Traditional scheduling systems spend a great amount of time and computing resources in solving a scheduling problem that involves many variables and factors. The difficulty grows very fast as the size of the scheduling problem grows. For this reason, large scheduling problems can be impossible to solve directly.